Any other FathomVerse users?

Nature Talk
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In short, FathomVerse is an app from Monterey Bay Aquarium that asks you to give mid-level IDs for images taken on ROV dives. While the premise isn’t dissimilar from iNat, there are plenty of differences:

  • It’s explicitly for the purpose of training an organism identification AI
  • it takes a minimalist approach, with four modes offered and basic filters
  • the categories aren’t strictly taxonomic, eg there is a category for “corals” that is polyphyletic, same for all “bony fishes” etc.
  • no internal socials, no interaction with other users
  • not possible to go back and see your history
  • notifications of updates only within the app and once you close it they’re gone
  • no desktop version
  • the mechanism of community ID is opaque

nonetheless! It’s very polished and it’s helped me a ton already in learning more about marine animals. I’m learning my siphonophores and comb jellies and types of coral – great stuff :) oh, and there are lots of blurry photos. Personally I like developing the ability to ID by gestalt.

The ID process is also very fast. you have preset buttons for your ‘favorite’ categories, and then a menu for ‘other’ – in total, there’s about 40 categories, most at around Order to Family or a polyphyletic equivalent. you can choose broader or narrower levels for some. “anemones” > “zooanthids”, or “mollusc” > “cephalopod” > “vampire squid”. in other cases… all sponges are together under “sponge”, which is understandable from an approachability angle.

more info here: https://www.fathomverse.game/

any way, I was wondering if anyone else has tried it out. and if so, what do you think of the differing approach vs. iNat? Overall, they’ve sacrificed a huge amount of customization and flexibility and community in exchange for a streamlined and approachable and efficient app.

Personally I like having both options, and going back-and-forth between iNat, FathomVerse, Wikipedia, YouTube, and whatever additional sources I can muster. It suits my ADHD to have more options for varied moods.

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I just downloaded it and tried it, because you posted it here.

Do you always have to wait and drift through the current, or is that just for training dives? Seems unnecessarily slow.

Will keep you posted if I play more.

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that’s only in the first mode. you can tap the up arrow to go faster – I also find it slow. once I got to the other modes I enjoyed myself much more.

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Monterey Bay Aquarium AND AI? What is this, a DougDoug video?

There’s actually a lot of projects like this on land, created even before iNat. I always called them camera trap projects, and so does this article I found, because most photos were from trail cams. Most of the ones I remember were for catching poachers (one called black mamba comes to mind) or for finding endangered species to force protection on a certain area.

Usually they shut down after awhile, due to lack of funding or because the project was completed. Being one of the most famous aquariums in the US (maybe the world?), I imagine Monterey Bay isn’t going to fall out of funding for it while they want it to continue and it’s longevity will probably rely on whether or not people continue to use it.

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they import new images every couple weeks or so, each from a new dive. I can’t see them running out any time soon, not with vessels like Nautilus’s Hercules running multiple dives a week for months per year.

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But what’s the point in uploading and hosting all those images if no one’s playing the game?

I wasn’t trying to imply the project is already doomed, anyway. I was just mentioning there’s a lot of similar projects that are abandoned, so anyone who goes looking for them should be prepared to run into a lot of dead ends

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So I played it for awhile and unlocked all modes. I have a few notes.

Before I get into the weeds, I’ll explain for anyone who hasn’t played. There’s 4 modes and three of them essentially do the same thing. “pulse,” “illuminate,” and “identify” are for organism ID and “bound” is for locating an organism within a photo. “identify” is the superior of the three ID modes by design.

The tutorial is way too long and unlocking new modes is a chore. The only way to unlock new modes is by playing Pulse in training mode, which sucks. You unlock new modes by certifying yourself in animals, which is done by playing Pulse in training mode three times PER ANIMAL (you can select three animals at once, but it’s still a chore). That might be a way to weed out tryhards and only get people who actually want to contribute, but it’s going to make the game very unappealing to newbies.

Besides Identify and excluding Bound, Pulse is unfortunately the better way to play imo. Don’t mistake me, I dislike Pulse (Imagine Pokemon Snap, but you can’t move the camera), but I like Illuminate less. Illuminate has you drag you finger on the screen to find photos, which really isn’t great because, like OP said, you can’t play on a desktop, so no mouse. It kind of makes you feel stupid for even trying to unlock it when you’re just going to go back to Pulse anyway, not just because it’s better, but because you have to certify new animals. Yeah, despite being functionally the same thing (““find”” photos, then ID them), you can’t certify animals in Illuminate mode; you HAVE to play Pulse, even if you do like Illuminate better.

Bound is the outlier game. It’s unlocked after Illuminate (Certify 5 animals for Illuminate and 10 for Bound, I think) which is strange to me, because by that point you would have turned away all the people who don’t like the three ID games who might have actually liked Bound. You just draw a square around where you think an organism is in a photo, even if you don’t know what it is. The big problem with it for me is that the photos are huge, with like 20 organisms in them, and they give them to you in batches of FIVE. You can’t x out of it once you start (from what I could tell) and if you close the app it just deletes whatever data you already provided so the absolute only way to get results is to sit there drawing boxes for ten minutes. I literally do not have time for ten uninterrupted minutes of box drawing with no way to save and quit.

Identify isn’t much of a game at all. You just sit there and Identify photos. They give them in batches of 50, but like OP said, it’s really quick to ID something. Unless you actually like Pulse and Illuminate, this is the only reason you were even playing them, but you need to certify 20 animals to unlock it (I’m pretty sure that’s 7 rounds of Pulse). I don’t have a problem with it being hard to unlock since it provides quality control, but I wish the other modes were even slightly appealing (literally just let me move the camera in Pulse and it’s 10/10)

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